This invention is directed to a system and method for calculating toner usage. More particularly, this invention is directed to a system and method for calculating percent of toner coverage or usage from compressed image data.
Consumables accounting in office and production environments is a high-demand feature for all types of document processing devices, particularly multifunctional peripheral devices. Most users expect a job accounting feature which has the ability to determine the pages printed as well as complete usage data for a user, a group of users, or a department. Estimating the percentage of toner or ink coverage is a difficult task to handle with software due to the large amounts of data involved. For example, a single page letter at 600 dpi contains 4 megabytes of data in its uncompressed form. At 5% coverage, which is a conservative estimate, would require 210,375 black pixels on the page. A single page at 1200 dpi would result in a four-fold increase to 16 megabytes and 841,500 black pixels on the page.
The time and storage space required to locate and count that many pixels on a modest size page makes it impractical to solve with software. Most solutions have included additional hardware to determine the percent coverage or have altered the toner cartridges to report the toner usage.
There is a need for a system and method for calculating toner usage using software and based on the compressed form of the raster image without uncompressing them to achieve higher processing speed and less resource consumption.